A Burmese Heart

A Burmese Heart

by Tinsa Maw-Naing & Y.M.V. Han

Copyright 2015 by Y.M.V. Han

Smashwords Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

Disclaimer: The authors have tried to recreate events, locales and conversations from Tinsa Maw-Naing’s personal memories.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Part I: Of Things Past

May 1966

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Part II: The Invisible War

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Glossary

About the Authors

PART I

OF THINGS PAST

MAY 1966

One by one, the people whom I loved the most slowly disappeared, chased in the night by shadowy figures in army greens. It began almost a year ago when my husband ignited a war, vanishing to the Thai-Burma border. The men of Rangoon trailed behind him, leaving their mothers, fathers, wives and children in their wake. It was only a matter of time before they came for me, too.

The regime dispatched its best men to retrieve me as the sun was rising over the city’s cracked wooden rooftops, the grass drenched in dawn rain. Soldiers in jade uniforms, armed with colonial-era rifles with the barrels sawed off, hid behind thick brush in the back of my home on University Avenue. A grand display of terror and intimidation for anyone thinking to follow in my husband’s footsteps. I cradled my four-month-old son, Zarni, in my arms as my escorts tied a dark towel around my head, the executioner’s mark. My son intuited the fear in my veins, warm tears streaming down his cheeks, little fingers grasping at my breast to be comforted. He was a final parting gift from my husband, conceived mere weeks before his departure, the only reason that they had waited so long to come for me.

I was placed in the back of a black sedan, windows darkened and insulated from prying eyes and curious lips. I did not need to ask where I was going. In the previous months, anti-government protesters and the wives of exiled men had gone missing, their names reduced to nothing but gossip and whispers. No one had made it back to tell their tales, a thunderous silence closing in on the Burmese.

The car jolted along hot asphalt until it gave way to a dirt path and jagged rocks. They removed the towel from my head, my eyes straining to discern a cavernous, barn-like structure, the entrance for many but exit for few. I was at Ye Kyi Aing Detention Center just outside of Rangoon, to be remembered in history as one of the most brutal detention centers in the world. Holding my son closer to my chest, I took a deep breath and stepped inside the corrugated iron gates, now officially an enemy of the state.

CHAPTER ONE

In the tradition of Burmese spiritualism, a series of events, people, and cosmic factors aligned to script my fate long before I entered this world on March 16, 1927. I was named Tinsa based on the day and time that I was born, my name and an ancient prayer inscribed on a cured palm leaf in an offering to the universe as my ancestors had done before me. Born on a Wednesday afternoon, my natal astrological chart presaged that I would be at the mercy of the planet Rahu. Burmese spiritualists consider Rahu, the Vedic deity who tried to swallow the sun, to be one of the most powerful planets. When placed negatively in one’s astrology, Rahu threads chaos, evil, and darkness through one’s roots. At his best, he gives his wards great opportunities of wealth, power, and the ability to make friends out of enemies. To be a Rahu-born is to play with fire, life always a balancing act between boundless harmony and unfettered bedlam, never destined to settle for the middle path.

Chaos was not a concept new to my family. I was born with it in my blood. My ancestors’ histories weave tales of bravery, adventure, heartbreak, loneliness, ambition, and conquest in the midst of Burma’s wild days, not unlike many of the tribulations that I would endure. The earliest ancestor that I can trace is my great-great-grandmother from the port city of Tavoy, a central trade route on the Asian seaboard. The city beckoned roughshod traders, diamond merchants, spice kings, explorers, ruthless mercenaries, pirates, and anyone brave enough to see for themselves what this distant, golden land could offer. Perhaps it was the essence of adventure in the Tavoy air that caught a hold of my great-great-grandmother, for she was fearless. Of Mon blood, she was a legendary beauty: tall and lithe with skin as pure as jasmine petals and hair as fine as Inle silk, masking steel beneath a porcelain exterior. One drizzling night, a burglar tried to break into her home while the family slept. As a city of vagabond traders and transient mercenaries, home invasions in Tavoy generally resulted in the loss of limbs or death for unlucky homeowners. Hearing rustling in the front yard, the Mon beauty stalked her home until she found the culprit: a would-be robber hanging from the crooked fence beams, his fingertips grasping the edges of the wooden slabs and the rest of him hidden in shadows.

There was no choice between fight or flight. She crept to the kitchen, her hands finding the handle of a large butcher knife normally used to decapitate chickens. I’m sure the burglar had his regrets, because the next thing he knew, she had sliced off the ends of his fingers that had been gripping the edge of the fence. The thief ran away screaming into the haze of night, leaving a trail of blood and finger stubs that mysteriously ended at the wharf.

The Mon beauty’s knife-wielding reputation scared off any potential well-to-do suitors, but she found love with a man named Theodore. I don’t know much about my great-great-grandfather, only that he was either an engineer or a ship captain. It is impossible to know whether he was a local man who adopted a Christian name or if he was one of many young men looking for wealth and exotic lands and ended up staying in Burma. His skin, the hue of refined palm sugar, was indistinguishable from the fairer Mon or the darker Portuguese or Armenian traders, his almond eyes and high cheekbones not giving away a thing.

She and Theodore had a son named U Maung Maung, an administrator for the Maubin jail system who married another fearless woman in the family line, Daw Khin [Daw is an honorific term for an elder woman or aunt.]. Maubin was a growing city on the banks of the Ayeyarwaddy River in southwest Burma, known for its ultra-orthodox monastic teachings and also for producing the most pungent nga-pi (fermented fish paste) in the south. It was the final days of the monarchy, the great King Mindon’s legacy overshadowed by his son Thibaw’s weak governance and cowering personality. Daw Khin did not have patience for what she viewed as the games of an isolated monarchy in an increasingly anarchic and lawless society. She took matters into her own hands, assembling local officials and appointing herself the town’s ombudswoman without the explicit consent of the authorities, who were intimidated by her domineering personality but in awe of her leadership. No one dared to challenge her, her stern visage enough to quell naysayers, a one-woman government policing Maubin’s muddy streets.

U Maung Maung and Daw Khin had eight children including my grandmother, Daw Thein Tin, a shrewd and notoriously stubborn woman. Among all of the adventurers and heroes in my bloodline, my grandmother’s story upended our family’s trajectory and altered the path of Burma’s modern history. Maubin could hardly contain Daw Thein Tin, who grew to be just as strong-willed as her mother. She met her future husband, U Shwe Kye, under scandalous circumstances involving her running off to a local political rally against her parents’ wishes and falling in love with a handsome, full-blooded Mon man from Moulmein in the crowd. Tall, fair, and erudite, U Shwe Kye was an engaging speaker whose intellect had caught the attention of King Mindon. Family lore has it that Daw Khin wept when her beautiful daughter married such an unapologetic monarchist, an insipid minion of a deteriorating court, in her eyes.

U Shwe Kye was born into modest means, the bright and ambitious young man earning himself a scholarship to study at Dr. Mark’s School in Moulmein. Gifted with English and modern languages, he became a courtier at the royal palace in Mandalay when Prime Minister Kinwun Mingyi asked him to accompany the court as a diplomatic attaché to London and Paris in 1872. An account of the trip, the Kinwun Mingyi Diary, is considered to be one of the most important documents in our modern history, chronicling the last great foreign mission of the Burmese monarchy before it fell to the British. Many believe that U Shwe Kye wrote the account on behalf of the Prime Minister, who spoke English conversationally but was not known to have mastered prose on the level displayed in the diaries.

When King Mindon died in 1878, the kingdom went into deep mourning, his successor Thibaw throwing the country into chaos. The British had already captured Lower Burma and marched north to the capital, preparing to annex the third and most important piece of the country: Mandalay. King Thibaw, consumed with family and court politics and with no formal military training, lost Mandalay to the British in 1885. British troops entered the palace gates with little resistance, minimal bloodshed, and wanton destruction only occurring when drunken soldiers set fire to the palace in celebration of their victory. My grandfather, U Shwe Kye, watched as flames swallowed hundreds of years of artifacts, the hand-carved teak ceiling caving in and entombing the memories of a dying but proud kingdom. He and the other courtiers watched as the library, containing handwritten palm leaf scrolls chronicling over one thousand years of our history, turned to dust. Harboring a profound loathing for the foreign invaders, he refused to take an oath of service under the colonial government and disappeared from Mandalay.

My grandfather resurfaced in Maubin where he lived with Daw Thein Tin and their two sons. What happened to him next remains shrouded in mystery. Many believed that he, a fervent nationalist and staunch royalist, left Maubin to form an underground anti-British movement from his hometown of Amherst (now called Kyaikkami). Days before his departure, U Shwe Kye donated a small pagoda made of silvery coastal stone to a local monastery, perhaps as penance for leaving behind his young wife and two little boys, Ba Han and Ba Maw.

My grandmother, Daw Thein Tin, witnessed King Thibaw’s royal barge en route to his exile in India, never to step foot in his homeland again. Like so many Burmese at the time, she felt that although the monarchy was by no means perfect, an independent Burma was better than a country controlled by foreign hands. This instilled in her, and in the rest of the Burmese, a nationalist sentiment that was passed on to her sons, Ba Han and Ba Maw. Be proud of who you are and fight for what you think is right. However, your duty is not only to this country but also to your family, she taught them in the aftermath of their father’s disappearance.

My father, Ba Maw, and his older brother, Ba Han, had no clear recollections of the early parts of their childhood. They did not remember their father but their faces would light up when speaking of their mother. Left penniless and without any means of support after U Shwe Kye’s disappearance, Daw Thein Tin was essentially widowed in an era in which the presence of an abandoned woman raised eyebrows. Nevertheless, she gave up all luxuries and her own needs in order to raise her sons as best as she could. Disregarding social norms and cold shoulders, Daw Thein Tin invested her scant savings in a single pony cart that grew to a fleet of gharries (hackney carriages). She sometimes drove the cart by herself, men groping her from the back seat, knives drawn to her throat in silenced back alleys. She and her two sons lived hand-to-mouth, impoverished, but they managed to survive. To my father, his mother was akin to a mythic being, his source of light through the darkness of his early years. Whatever humiliations she endured at the hands of poverty in order to provide for her two sons were not lost on Ba Maw and Ba Han.

I never knew my paternal grandmother, Daw Thein Tin, the very mention of her name enough to send my father and uncle into a misty-eyed state. You would have loved and feared her at the same time, they boasted of their mother. Phay Phay, as I affectionately called my father, later chose my mother, Kinmama, a force of nature in politics and history, and expected his daughters and granddaughters to live up to their illustrious predecessors. To him, women were the beacon, the dark, rich earth from which all life grew.

The greatest gift that Daw Thein Tin would bestow on her young sons was their education. She knew that Maubin’s schools, primarily monastic academies led by saffron-robed monks with little experience of the world beyond the city’s confines, could not prepare her sons for a future under British rule. If her sons were to grow in the harsh light of colonial society, they needed an education to survive in the increasingly cutthroat and multicultural lion’s pit. In short, they needed a western education. With her natural shrewdness, tenacity, and the help of generous relatives, she enrolled Ba Han and Ba Maw at St. Paul’s School in Rangoon.

St. Paul’s was the best boarding school in Rangoon, admitting the sons of British-Indian officers, Anglo-Burmese, Indian merchants, and wealthy Burmese. It also took in financially disadvantaged boys, and Daw Thein Tin seized this opportunity for her children. These boys of charity were third-class students, entitled to the same education but without the comforts of first and second-class students such as private tuition before exams, personal ties to the headmaster, or cricket lessons to prepare them as gentlemen of leisure. My father’s time at boarding school was a humbling experience. To be considered little more than a student of charity was yet another struggle, a thousand small cuts dealt to his pride, but it had an unusual advantage for him and his brother. They studied diligently, drawing on the pain of being separated from their beloved mother to forge ahead with unyielding determination. When older boys would corner them in the schoolyard, they fought back, living the school motto of Labor Omnia Vincit through bruised knuckles and calloused writing hands.

My father often recounted one of the most bitter and enlightening moments of his bleak adolescence. One sunny day, he wandered the streets near his childhood home in Maubin, a single-room shack with dirt floors and a tin roof continually battered by a patch of low-hanging coconut trees. An adventurous and inquisitive boy, he entertained himself by zigzagging through tree-lined streets, peering inside the iron gates of wealthier residents. Gardeners meticulously clipped flower bushes, the landscape never uneven with wild poppies or pesky weeds. Chauffeured lorries gleamed as their drivers slept under the shade of mango trees, rubbing their eyes awake when the families needed to go to market.

He stopped, mesmerized by what lay in a serpentine driveway. Blood-red metal glistening and summoning him. The owner, a flaxen-haired, blue-eyed boy whose crisp cottons had never touched the dirt of the world outside of his wrought iron gates, sat beneath a stone portico and was lost in a world of toy trucks and tin soldiers. Phay Phay yearned to yell at him, to open the gates and play with him on the dusty streets, the realities of their divergent existences disappearing for a fleeting moment. He had never had a bo friend before, a Caucasian or European playmate, especially not one with such a beautiful tricycle. Perhaps the boy would even let him ride it, two new friends exploring the world together on three wheels.

Phay Phay could no longer contain his excitement, inching nearer to the gate to have a look at the red beauty. He thought about all of the places that he could go and how jealous his brother would be. While he was wading in his thoughts, a shadow appeared on the other side of the gate, blocking his view of the boy and the tricycle. What are you doing here, boy? barked the opaque figure. A woman’s face, caked in thanaka [a paste made from the bark of the Thanaka tree] like the street vendors from his neighborhood, confronted him as if he were a sewer rat that had crawled over her shoes. He stood frozen as the blonde boy turned to stare at the scene, not knowing whether to run or to endure the humiliation of the nanny’s shouts. Go back to where you came from! You don’t belong here! she continued to bark.

Cheeks burning, his dusky eyes singed with tears, Phay Phay took off, unable to contain the hot flushes of embarrassment and indignity that boiled in his gut. He ran until the manicured, oak-lined avenues gave way to the familiarity of dirt paths covered in rubbish and feral dogs nipping at his blistered heels. He now knew his place in society, that he and the blonde boy were seen differently: one would enjoy the niceties in life while he wasn’t even good enough for a look at a mere toy. A child’s humiliation, ingrained, seared for a lifetime.

My father often said that his only regret of his early years was not the pressing poverty, treatment as a second-class citizen, or the superficial humiliations he endured as a child. His greatest regret was that he could not provide the kind of life that his mother so greatly deserved before she passed away. She did not witness the fabled heights to which her sons rose, Ba Han becoming a famed legal scholar and academic, and my father becoming the first Burmese to lead the country in the colonial era.

* * * * *

When my parents met in 1926, my mother Kinmama and her sister Kinmimi were two of the most eligible young women in Rangoon given their beauty and even more beautiful dowries, the kind of girls who instinctively knew when to bow their heads and dared not to eat or drink first in the presence of elders. My father had returned from his studies at Cambridge, Gray’s Inn, and completed his doctorate at the University of Bordeaux by way of generous bursaries and careful savings, to become the first Burmese appointed to the English department at Rangoon College in 1917. Having not only mastered academia, Ba Maw had perfected the art of European conversation, socialization, and dress. What must my mother, outwardly a daisy of a woman in her silk longyis [a traditional sarong skirt], have thought of Ba Maw, a gregarious young man who preferred cocktail parties over traditional tea houses?

Kinmama saw past his tuxedoes and silk jackets, his armor against the prejudices of colonial Burma. Despite her wealth, she and Kinmimi were born to modest means like Ba Maw and Ba Han, also raised by a single mother whose dogged determination ensured that her two daughters would have a better chance at life. Born on December 13, 1905, she was the eldest of three daughters born to U Htwa Nyo and Daw Sein. Kinmama lost her father at a young age, U Htwa Nyo retiring to bed one night and suddenly dying of heart failure. Her mother, Daw Sein, became a widow at twenty-five years old, another tragedy occurring when one of the daughters passed away not long afterwards.

Daw Sein refused to capitulate to hardship, becoming a teacher at the American Baptist Mission School (ABM) in Rangoon. Her students stood shoulder-to-shoulder with her, twice the size of street children of the same age. Daw Sein remained undaunted by their size and status, caning them with rigid bamboo stalks when her brawny students were out of line. I had to do it, she recounted. If I were to flinch just once when handling the cane, those children would have never respected me again.

A schoolroom could hardly contain her ambitions. Like all Burmese women then and now, there was always a private home business going on behind closed doors to supplement incomes, as well as to provide a rare social opportunity for women of the middle class. Befitting her name (Madame Diamond in Burmese), my grandmother began to buy and sell small pieces of jewelry to her circle during afternoon tea breaks. Since she did not have enough capital for a large enterprise, she built her credibility through introductions to reputable Indian jewelers who controlled the diamond trade from across the border. Their patrons commissioned diamond lattice chokers, amethyst chandelier earrings, spinel beads the size of quails’ eggs, but these jewelers sought a broader commercial base. Daw Sein became their intermediary and brokered sales for middle-class housewives with an insatiable appetite for gems. Through hard work, integrity, and a spotless reputation, my grandmother expanded her clientele and handled larger pieces of bespoke jewelry with specific orders for diamonds.

Daw Sein finally lived up to her name and opened her own brokerage in downtown Rangoon, the only Bamar [the dominant ethnic group] who dared to set up shop in the middle of the Indian quarter. Pigeon’s blood rubies from Mogok. Cornflower blue sapphires from the north. Turmeric yellow diamonds from India. Daw Sein was rumored to be so rich that she would frequently leave bowls of jewelry outside of her front gate, alerting con artists, social climbers, and others who wished to use her for nefarious means to take what they wanted and to leave her alone. She bought large tracts of land including a house on 50th Street where Kinmama and Kinmimi lived as daughters of the upper middle class. My mother, Kinmama, learned her numbers by sitting with her mother nightly at their teak dining table and helping her settle accounts from the brokerage. She became an astute businesswoman and learned to appreciate money at a young age, that wealth was earned and not an entitlement.

Kinmama and Kinmimi enrolled at St. John’s Convent, run by an army of Catholic nuns imported from Europe. It was the finest education for young women in Rangoon, learning social graces alongside arithmetic and literature. My aunt, Kinmimi, resisted the idea of school altogether, refusing to go until the age of seven when their mother bribed a police officer to escort her to the front gates. My mother, Kinmama, on the other hand, thrived in an academic environment. She retained an excellent grasp of English, something that would be invaluable to her as a barrister’s wife and the future First Lady. She excelled in mathematics as a result of handling her mother’s accounts, her school marks surpassing that of her peers, male and female. Perhaps in a different era, my mother would have gone on to become a scientist or groundbreaking mathematician, but those were unthinkable professions for a respectable girl at the time. Her academic prowess was celebrated throughout the colonial school system, a young woman lauded for her achievements within convent walls as long as it was understood that she would take her place inside the home after her schooling.

She eschewed moss-covered university dorms to focus on marriage like her peers. In those days, it was fashionable to employ a matchmaker who shuffled through various social circles, purse overflowing with miniature portrait photos of potential suitors. Kinmama did not have to wait long before setting her sights on Ba Maw, a young barrister who had recently returned from Europe. The jolly, corpulent matchmaker delighted in handing Kinmama a small photo of Ba Maw. He just finished his doctorate in Bordeaux, the matchmaker auntie cooed. He is sophisticated, worldly, staying true to his roots in Rangoon.

He may be a man of the world, but I’m a Burmese girl, quipped Kinmama. Well then, let’s meet this world traveler.

My parents were engaged immediately, the details of their first meeting taken to their graves. I tried my best to convince my mother to divulge the lurid details in later years, only for her to blush and tell me to mind my own business. Dr. Ba Maw and Daw Kinmama were married in April 1926, by all means a happy marriage resulting in seven children. I was born in 1927, my brother Zali in 1928, sister Mala in 1929, followed by Theda, Onma, Binnya, and Neta in 1931, 1934, 1937, and 1947.

One of the earliest and most vivid memories that I have of my childhood is of my mother’s silk longyis. Every morning, she would come to my bed and rouse me, an apple-cheeked child rolling awake at the warmth of May May’s tone dripping like honey, the aria of my childhood. As the eldest, I was allowed to sit in her dressing room, enraptured as she opened her wardrobe doors to release a sharp burst of aged wood and the unmistakable scent of tightly woven silk, the smell of mountain air and earth. In that instant, the room would explode in a firework display of mauve, lavender, fuchsia, turquoise, emerald, and china white, every imaginable hue set alight by the morning sun and shouting at my mother for her attention. Pick me! Pick me! they clamored.

Tinsa, which one should I wear today? she would ask me, her smile revealing teeth like ivory piano keys.

I traced each pile with both hands, the silk as cool as deep water, the stiff fabric rustling at my fingertips like leaves. Every design was unique, each thread and weave telling the story of their origins. Her Inle longyis were landscapes of Shan State, jagged pastels and tribal blots evoking lily blossoms floating on the great northern lake, hills and valleys etched on the horizon. The Kachin and Arakan pieces boasted arrow-shaped embroidery, remnants of thousands of years of warrior tradition. Or, I could have chosen the Burmese-Indian paisley prints blooming with millions of teardrops. Yet how could I possibly settle on one when all of Burma was sitting in my mother’s wardrobe?

I never did choose, worried that if I were to deem one more beautiful than the rest, that the other proud fabrics would hate me. Tinsa! May May’s breathy laugh would pull me from the deep well of my imagination, while her deft hands plucked the lucky winner from the stack, to be wrapped triumphantly around her tiny waist for the day. Aunt Kinmimi and my grandmother Daw Sein also lived with us, the gentle clacking of stones and heavy gold trailing them as they left for their jewelry brokerage every morning.

My siblings and I were merely planets orbiting around the sun and the moon that were my parents. If my mother was the lens through which I saw Burma, then my father was my key to unlocking the outer world. So much of this book and my early life are about him and the choices that he made. Phay Phay wanted to ensure that my siblings and I saw not only Burmese life but also the world past our gates, the fire-spitting cauldron that was Rangoon and beyond. One of the first things that I remember him saying to me was, Learn everything there is to know about the world, about people and their ways. Apply the good and learn from the bad. If there was one thing that my father wanted for us, it was to keep an open mind about everything that the universe had to offer while keeping our hearts rooted in Burma, a lesson learned from his own upbringing.

The first time that my father took us to see a Charlie Chaplin film, my brother Zali and the other children in the audience bawled at the sight of the Tramp’s ghostly pallor and strange little moustache, the comedian contorting his face and body in a manner to which my little brother was not accustomed to seeing. My sister Mala and I feigned tears in solidarity. Phay Phay was so alarmed by our collective screeching that he collected all three of us in his arms and left the theater in the middle of the film, the first and last time that we would ever see Chaplin in a proper cinema.

Christmas was by far the most eccentric spectacle in our home. To this day, I’m still not sure how my father convinced my devoutly Buddhist mother to cook a proper Christmas dinner and source a miniature palm tree for our living room year after year. She spent hours preparing roasted chicken, potatoes, gravy, ham, cauliflower au gratin and fruitcake, but she drew the line at giving Christmas presents, balking at the idea of gifting on occasions other than weddings and the birth of a child. My father treasured these dinners just as he had in Europe. As a student, he had looked forward to snow on Christmas Eve, blanketing the concrete avenues of Great Britain and France in a thick powder, something that he